


Chupacabra

by Anonymous



Category: Jackalope Wives Series - Ursula Vernon
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27803944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The Cholla Bone Girl is sent sheep shearing.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6
Collections: Anonymous, Yuletide 2020





	Chupacabra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ginkgofan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginkgofan/gifts).



The lessons of the desert were written beneath the Cholla Bone Girl’s skin before she was born, she knew them in her soul but she was raised in a town by train priests and it was men’s rules she knew in her soft heart. It was that soft heart that was the problem, the Cholla Bone Girl and Spook-Cat’s initial boding had been a sign Grandma Harken thought. She was gentle enough to tempt Spook-Cat out from under Grandma Harken’s bed and to convince him to allow himself to be petted. Kind enough to ache for everything that hurt in the desert but hurt was the desert’s way the hare ate the thin grass, the coyote ate the hare, and the coyote’s scat fed the thin grass.

The trouble started when she sent the Cholla Bone Girl down to Tomas to help with the shearing. Not that kind of trouble, the Cholla Bone Girl was far too young and all of Tomas’s sons too old for her and their son’s younger than her. No, this was the kind of trouble a desert child can cause when she has a soft heart that listens to men’s concerns above what her own soul knows. Grandma Harken sent her down with a jar of tomato jam from her own plants and the hope that she’d get a quiet week and a fleece to work up out of the deal. She was an old woman and teaching a preteen was taxing work. A week of quiet, a good fleece to work up for the Cholla Bone Girl’s bed and a chance for her to socialise with people her own age for a jar of last summer’s jam, Grandma Harken had thought it a good deal.

The first sign of trouble was the Cholla Bone Girl and Spook Cat communing on the stoop. There were tear tracks on the Cholla Bone Girl’s face that had dried a dirty red with the dust from the track she’d walked back along, her shoes were scuffed on the toes and it was too early. The sun was still above the mesquite trees and Grandma Harkin herself was just barely back from her own gathering, the Cholla Bine Girl should not have been back until the sun was setting on the horizon and the chilli Grandma Harken had left stewing was just about ready. She was bad at this and too old for it, Grandma Harken thought as she sat down next to the Cholla Bone Girl. Her presence was too much for Spook Cat who took off into the house. Thankfully she didn’t have to push, the Cholla Bone Girl wanted to tell her, wanted to spill her woes and have someone solve her problems. 

The Cholla Bone Girl spoke in body wracking sobs, ‘Matthias said if I cared I’d stop the chupacabra getting their sheep. I said the chupacabra were here first. It’s their land that the sheep were brought into.’ 

The rest spilled out a tale of small cruelties Grandma Harken had seen time and again from a charismatic leader of an in-group toward a child on the outside. She provided what comfort she could but this was something the Cholla Bone Girl would have to toughen her soft heart to in Grandma Harken’s experience.

Grandma Harken wasn’t kind and neither was the desert and the Cholla Bone girl was promised Tomas until the shearing was done so the next morning the Cholla Bone Girl dragged her feet on the way down with strict instructions not to leave early this time.

Grandma Harken felt it like a shockwave through the ground she was tilling, a ripping through her soul binding her away from what was hers. She didn’t need the birds suddenly rising in raucous flight from their perches to know that something was very wrong nor did she need the rapidly approaching coyote to tell her that it was her job to fix it. Slowly and methodically she packed up her gardening tools ignoring the coyote pacing just outside her fence, trying to regain her equilibrium and quite the rabbit part of her mind that wanted to do anything but walk towards Tomas’s farm.

The walk to Tomas’s farm was long and lonely. The coyote wouldn’t follow her towards the human habitation and no other humans were travelling the little used road in the heat of midday. The horizon shimmered in front of Grandma Harken, every step kicked up a small cloud of reddish dust that coated her skirts and if she hurried choked her lungs and made her wish for more of her canteen than she could spare. She had to fight every step against the feeling that she was unwelcome that this place that was hers as much as it was any desert creatures was not longer open to her. By the time she got there she was thoroughly grumpy and done with idiot children.

Grandma Harken was white with strain by the time she found the Cholla Bone Girl collapsed on the ground next to a dead sheep sobbing so hard her entire body shook. The Cholla Bone Girl didn’t react to her arrival until Grandma Harken leant down to shake her, ‘Get up girl,’ she said.

‘It hurts,’ the Cholla Bone Girl sobbed.

‘You’re as much a creature of desert as the chupacabra, the cicada and I,’ Grandma Harken said. ‘You’ve just told the land this area is desert no more and no desert creature is welcome here. Get up. You’ve killed this land and we are no longer welcome here.’

The Cholla Bone Girl wiped her face, and tried to pull herself together. Grandma Harken could see the strain in the fine shaking of the Cholla Bone Girl no matter how tightly she held herself. ‘How dowe stop it?’ she asked.

‘It’s not as easy to undo what was recklessly done.’ Grandma Harken said turning to walk back home. ‘Especially without the permission of the people you have given the land to. Tomas is a good man but humans are stupid and short sighted.’

It took a year for the Cholla Bone Girl to stop crying as they walked up the road past Tomas’s farm to the town. A year and a half for Tomas and his family to realise that the microorganisms that digested their sheep’s poo and the grass were as much desert creatures as the coyote and the chupacabra. Two years for Tomas and family to start trying to welcome select desert creatures back on to their land. Three long painful years for them to realise that welcoming select creatures wouldn’t work and they would have to allow all desert creatures on their land for the land to live.

It was a long hard way to learn a lesson in caution.


End file.
